Recent trends in personal computing, data communications, on-line services, computer hardware and application program software have transformed the ordinary household into a hotbed of information and communication activity. Increasingly, individuals have computers, facsimile machines, modems, entertainment centers, cable-ready televisions and multiple telephones all located in their households for facilitating a variety of communications. Due to the increased usage of such devices in the household, many product retailers and service providers are interested in, and assign great value to, the collection of data representing the usage habits of individuals at the household level. For example, market researchers target the collection of data to aid in the evaluation of the effectiveness of alternative forms of television commercials.
The prior art is replete with various systems and arrangements for monitoring the viewing habits of television viewers. Early systems collected data at a given viewer site for later manual collection. Such manually collected data included, for example, identification of television channels viewed and the times of viewing for various panels of viewers in order to determine market share and ratings of various television programs. Later systems were designed for use with cable television systems which have two-way communications over the cable system between the head end of the system and various cable subscribers. In this type of system, the television sets themselves are periodically contacted from the central location over the cable connection, with the channel selection and time information being sent back to the central location. Other prior art systems incorporate storage devices (e.g., memory) at the remote location for accumulating the relevant viewing data over time. The accumulated data is then periodically transmitted over conventional telephone lines from the remote locations to the central location by telephone calls initiated by either the remote stations or the central location itself.
In the past, systems for remotely accumulating data regarding the habits of television viewers and their qualitative reaction to viewed material were important from a market research standpoint. For example, the effectiveness of television commercials can be monitored by correlating the viewing of those commercials with the subsequent purchase activities of panelists whose viewing habits are being monitored. One prior art system for data gathering with particular utility in market research type applications is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,546,382, issued on Oct. 8, 1985, to McKenna et al. (hereinafter "McKenna"). This patent describes a system that includes a plurality of remote units which are controlled from a central location. Each of the remote units is attached to a television receiver which is generally but not necessarily attached to a cable system. Each of the remote units can function to determine which of several television (hereinafter "TV") modes is in use, as well as to store TV channel selector data, data from an optical input device, and/or data input by viewers representative of the composition of the viewing audience. The data is stored for either later collection by a portable data collector, or for direct transmission to the central location by each of the remote units. A video message for a TV viewer (e.g., a survey question) may be transmitted from the central location and stored at the remote units for later display on the TV receiver associated with the remote units. In sum, a variety of television-related metering devices and data collection systems are well known which are placed in the household and transparent to the occupants of the household which monitor TV channel changes, viewing habits, accumulate time on a given channel and other information, and communicate the data gathered to a central location (e.g., server) using dedicated telephone lines.
Data collection systems, such as described in McKenna, directed at TV data collection have provided transparent mechanisms to collect TV-related usage data from households. However, increasingly in today's home environments, the occupants have, and interact with, a variety of other devices. For example, the following devices are becoming commonplace in households: computers, facsimile machines, modems, multiline telephones and entertainment centers. Just as remotely accumulating data regarding the habits of television viewers is important from a market research standpoint so is similar data which can be collected from these other devices. For example, computers equipped with high-speed modems allow individuals within the household to make a variety of purchases from electronic on-line services or to access various types of product or market data from electronic sources. From a market research standpoint, capturing data regarding such transactions is invaluable in order to market the product and/or services to the home.